PHILOSOPHY

PHILOSOPHY. Philosophy as a distinct discipline dates from the Greek thinkers of the 6th c. B.C., and especially from the time of Plato (q.v.). In origin it was in part a reaction against the inadequacies of traditional pagan religion and the inherited mythology; it often sought through reason to validate traditional practice. With Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, philosophy became the intellectual and spiritual lens through which the cultivated elite of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds viewed their universe. While several different schools existed in the Roman Empire (q.v.) at the time of Christ, it was the three above that dominated the world of late antiquity; in the work of Plotinus (q.v.) they achieved a kind of fusion. Thus Neoplatonism (q.v.), codified two centuries later by Proclus (d. 486)-who set the philosophical curriculum for the whole Byzantine era (q.v.)-was the philosophy of the later Church Fathers (q.v.).

From the 2nd-c. “Mid-Platonism” of the Apologists (q.v.) down to the capture of Constantinople (q.v.) in 1453, Christian writers sought a way to come to terms with philosophy. Many embraced it gladly: Clement of Alexandria, Origen, the Cappadocians, and Dionysius the Areopagite (qq.v.)-always with careful revisions. Others, particularly in monastic circles, were more dubious, regarding the philosophers’ claims of autonomous reason as deluded or demonic. The inherent tension between revealed truth and the sovereignty of reason was never resolved, then or now. Modern Orthodox look to the Fathers and see, first, that the questions of the modern world are very seldom new, and second, that spiritual writers have dealt with many of these issues in particular ways. The latter emphasized the purification of the intellect itself, an affirmation that reason requires the school of humility (q.v.) in order to work in a way adequate to the mystery of Christ.